Get the latest gossip
‘The Visitor’ Review: A Searching Lithuanian Character Study Caught Between the Peace of Solitude and the Pang of Loneliness
In Vytautas Katkus' appealingly offbeat 'The Visitor,' a new father journeys back to his homeland to wrap up a life left behind — and can't let it go.
The film requires niche distributors (and viewers) attuned to its unhurried gait and beguilingly odd humor, but its profile will be lifted by a competition berth in Karlovy Vary, along with a rising tide in recent Lithuanian cinema that has also benefited festival successes like “Drowning Dry,” “Toxic” and 2023 Sundance winner “Slow.” An accomplished cinematographer who shot last year’s Locarno competition champ, “Toxic” by director Saule Bliuvaite (who takes a cameo role here), Katkus assumes DP duties here too, veering away from that film’s hard digital aesthetic toward the warm, gauzy tactility of 16mm — apt enough for a story that rests heavily on semi-faded memories. But feel them we do, via surges and retreats in movement, mood and weather, fragments of conversation and karaoke floating in the late-summer air, or the tinny synths of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” played over cramped cellphone speakers, eagerly starting a party with a scant handful of guests.
Or read this on Variety